The weight of her words hung heavily. It seemed a long time passed before Matt asked, “How did you learn about his death?”
“I was at work. I was writing for an entertainment blog.” The receptionist had appeared at her cubicle.
“Some men are here to see you,” she’d said, wide-eyed. “I put them in the conference room.”
Some men.
Her stomach had turned to stone. The walk from the cubicle to the conference room felt like it happened in slow motion.
The conference room was glass. Two officers stood inside.
“Mrs. Kincaid?”
One of the officers drew the opaque shades down for privacy.
It took Lauren seconds to process the fact that they were wearing Class A dress uniforms. She had learned about this scenario in a family-readiness meeting before Rory’s deployment. Battle-dress uniform: injured. Class A dress uniform: killed.
Now, remembering it, Lauren broke down in sobs and looked around for tissues.
“Lauren,” Matt said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Can you get me a—”
“I’ll be right back.” He disappeared into the hallway and returned with a box of Kleenex. She wiped her nose, trying to calm herself from outright hysterics to a reasonable cry.
“I’m just surprised they came to talk to you at work. Why not wait until you were home? In private?”
She nodded. It was a good question. “They were afraid, because of Rory’s fame, that the news would leak out before they could reach me. They couldn’t risk waiting.”
She sagged with exhaustion, her entire body weighted.
Matt moved close, unclipped her mic, and took the sound pack from her waist. She felt like collapsing against him. He steered her away from the camera and over to the bed.
“Just sit here for a minute. Let me get those off.” He turned off the lights, clicking on only a bedside reading lamp. The room felt calmer, and her sobs quieted to hiccups.
Matt pulled up a chair so he sat facing her. He reached for her hands, damp from her soggy tissue.
“Lauren, I understand.”
“No, you don’t,” she said. And then the words she’d been holding in for four years: “Because it’s all my fault.”
There. It was out. And maybe this was what she’d been afraid of revealing all along, not Rory’s failings, but her own.
“Lauren, you know guilt is a common feeling in a situation like this. He died; you’re still here. I felt it too with my brother.”
“No, you don’t understand. Rory volunteered for that second tour.”
Matt said nothing for a minute, and she knew the storyteller in him could put the pieces together. She’d refused to see her husband and banned him from their home. And after two months of being shut out, he turned back to the place where he felt useful, strong, in control; he sent himself back to Iraq. And he lost his life.
“I didn’t even know it was possible for him to go back that soon,” she said. “He had to have gotten special permission. He had to have wanted to get away that badly.”
“He would have been sent back eventually. You know that,” Matt said.
She shook her head, unable to speak. All she could hear was Emerson’s words the day of Rory’s memorial.
Hordes of photographers and news vans waited outside of her house. Two of Rory’s former teammates went into the house first, returned with bedsheets, and used them to shield her from the cameras as they hustled her from the car and through the front door.
The doorbell kept ringing. The house was filled with military personnel, the guys from Rory’s platoon and many more, plus the entire LA Kings team and guys from nearly every team he’d played on since middle school.
She noticed Rory’s mother and Emerson heading toward the bedrooms. Lauren had offered to have Kay Kincaid stay with her, but she’d said she preferred the hotel where her son was staying. Lauren wondered if she was going to the guest bedroom to lie down, if she was feeling okay.
Lauren followed them into the hallway.
“Kay, are you doing all right?”
Rory’s mother, tall for a woman and once spry and athletic, looked frail as she leaned on Emerson. She was in her late sixties; her hair was stark white and her olive complexion was uncharacteristically pale against her plain black dress. Her eyes were dark. They were Rory’s eyes.
“Are you following us?” Kay said.
“What? No. I mean, yes. I wanted to check on you.”
“She’s fine,” said Emerson. “Mother, go on ahead. I want to talk to Lauren for a minute.”
This was it, Lauren thought. She and Emerson were finally united. But it was too late for it to matter.
“Rough day,” she said.
“Save your crocodile tears for someone who buys it.”
She looked at him, stunned.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“If you hadn’t thrown my brother out of this house, if you hadn’t refused to join him on post, he’d probably still be here today.”
She knew she shouldn’t bite, but she couldn’t help herself. She was already blaming herself for everything. Emerson’s recriminations couldn’t be worse.
“No one wishes more than I do that we’d fixed our marriage before…before…”
“He volunteered to go back, you know.”
She hadn’t.
“No. It was soon, but I thought—”
“He campaigned for redeployment. It was the only thing he could do to get over losing his marriage. I have all the letters to prove it.”
She was shocked, but her instinct for self-preservation forced her to defend herself.
“He wouldn’t have been there in the first place if it weren’t for your influence!”
“You know, there’s a reason they give guys dwell time, keep them stateside after a deployment. They need it. But a public figure like Rory jumping right back in? Permission granted. Still, you have to wonder how things would have played out if he’d waited to go back until he was more battle-ready. If he hadn’t been running away from you.”
“It’s all my fault,” she said to Matt.
“Lauren, listen to me: You know better than that. You think you should have stayed in a dangerous, abusive situation to keep your husband around so he wouldn’t go back into a war zone? Think about this rationally. Just take a step back and look at it. I see things in terms of narrative, okay? My work is to understand cause and effect. You are not connecting the dots in a logical way.”
She sobbed. “You really don’t see it how I do?” she said. “It’s so obvious to me.”
“No, Lauren. No one would see it the way you do. Probably not even Emerson in a more rational frame of mind. And you have to stop blaming yourself. Or it’s going to ruin your life. And you deserve to have a life, you know.”
She cried and he moved his chair close enough that he could hug her. She sobbed against his shoulder, and he repeated, “You deserve to have a life.” She heard it again and again, even after he was silent, even after her breathing returned to normal.
“I should go,” she said, pulling back.
“Yeah, God, it’s late. Um, okay. Let me find my car keys.”
“Oh, it’s fine—I can walk.”
“Lauren, don’t be ridiculous.”
Outside, the air was thick with water and salt. Soon, the sun would be up. It was a magical hour, night just about to turn into day. Everything around her seemed to hum and vibrate with life.
She lowered the window on her side, letting the air whip through her hair. Matt turned on the radio and the car filled with a song she remembered from eighth grade, “Drops of Jupiter” by Train, told a story about a man who is too afraid to fly so he never did land.
Matt pulled up in front of the Green Gable and turned off the car. Through the open window, she heard the cicadas humming in the tall grass that framed the stairs to the beach.
“One summer, when we were in high school,” she whispered, “I was driving us around in the rain. Rory opened the sunroof. Something about that moment…it was the most free I ever felt in my life.”
Matt reached for her hand. “You’ll feel like that again someday.” She pulled her hand away.
“I never told anyone what happened between me and Rory.”
“You mean about him hitting you?”
She nodded.
“Didn’t you go talk to anyone after he died? A counselor? Anything?”
“I saw a psychiatrist. But all she did was give me a prescription for Zoloft.”
“Fantastic,” he said sarcastically. “Did you at least tell your mother? A friend?”
“No,” she said. “No one. Until you.”